Enterprises should follow these five vital steps to cloud success

Ramp up your organisational speed and agility by restructuring architectures, applications and data for cloud. Your business needs faster, more efficient and cost-effective applications that are refactored (recoded) for the cloud. This will enable you to swap different components in and out with zero disruption, by abstracting the underlying infrastructure and platform. By thinking holistically about the flow of data, you can easily adopt new technologies as the customer need dictates.

This can however be a substantial undertaking for global organisations with large legacy estates. In this case, modernisation cannot happen overnight, and a careful strategy must be developed that allows for flexibility to adapt over time. Failure to design a strong architecture can render even the services from hyperscalers ineffective thus undermining the expected value.

Run and optimise

Adopt new ways of operating that push your cloud estate to ever higher levels of business performance and sustainability. This is where many cloud journeys falter. The traditional model of managing capacity by purchasing and running physical hardware doesn’t work. Instead, you must continuously manage consumption, capacity, performance, and crucially – cost.

It requires a very different skillset as well as new operational functions. You need people who don’t just react to spikes in consumption but understand and anticipate why they’re happening and how they impact ITs carbon footprint.

Further, they need to know what business processes are involved, how critical they are and how they all fit together. Management in the cloud is largely a software exercise in which teams write code to monitor and fix the estate, bringing extra complexity to management and optimisation, and according to our research, it is the main reason why many enterprises choose to work with a partner. This frees teams from the burden of day-to-day cloud management and enables them to build up enterprise capabilities in areas that differentiate the business.

Innovate and grow

Use cloud as a digital transformation lever, creating a foundation for rapid experimentation, innovation and new business models. This enables experimentation at speed to let you spin up new environments instantly, try out several ideas at once, and see what’s working quickly and securely.

With the strategic use of data, advanced analytics and AI, cloud can also act as a catalyst for business reinvention. Clouds helps to leverage data at scale, unlock its value with AI, improve data quality and combine the potential of advanced technologies like machine learning and the vast numbers of future edge devices connected to the Internet of Things. It’s about scalable compute power to support increasingly sophisticated AI models.

Furthermore, access to an ecosystem of partners or hyperscalers can be an innovation game-changer. Through collaboration, you can gain access to cutting edge technology. With the speed provided by the cloud, and by working with cloud hyperscalers and other service providers, enterprises can shift their focus away from the “keep the lights on” operations that currently take up so much of their teams’ attention. People and funds can be freed up to focus on how systems can adapt to what the business and its customers will need next.